Doubles Matchups

[Jester]

In the summer there was some issue with the doubles section of the sheets. I'm not sure if we discussed it here on the forum or if I just spoke to a number of people about it, but there was a little change so that one player wasn't stuck only playing one doubles match while the other two players got to play the first two matches in both sets.

With the change that I made there was no issue until this week when JP mentioned that the way it is set up, as long as the team made player 1 their best player, they had a great chance to get 6 easy points in doubles. This was a very valid point and I never knew about this before.

When looking at the game sheets from Wednesday night, the team Taha subbed for had Taha as player 1, and since player 1 plays the first two games of each doubles set, they won 6 points easily. This was also the case for our team, IGYSRH, and Hammerblow.

So I spent some time figuring out how to make each player's contribution to the doubles matches equal. Jesse and I spoke about assigning value to a player which depends on which games they play during doubles.

We decided that it made sense to assign a value of 3 to each player that plays in the first game of a set because it is the most important. The first game of each set is most important because you need to win it in order to have a chance to win the second game and get the 3 points for that set.

The second game in the set is also important because if you've won the first one then you want your best players playing in the second game in order to have the best chance of sweeping the opponent and getting the three points. For this reason we assign a value of 2 to each player that plays in the second game of the set.

The third game in the set is not guaranteed to be played, and if it needs to be played it means that the 3 points is off the table and the most that a team will get is 2 points. Since this is the least important game in the set, the players in this match will get a value of 1.

Game # 1 = value of 3, Game # 2 = value of 2, Game # 3 = value of 1

Now that we have translated the qualitative "players' contribution" into quantitative values for each player, we can find a set up that makes all three players' contributions to the doubles matches equal. This will eliminate the bias that JP brought up on Wednesday night.

Here is the Current League Sheet:


You can see what JP was talking about when we assign the values 3,2,1 to the players depending on the game (it's importance) they play in. The chart titled "Value Available" shows how the value is assigned to each player for team 1. The totals for each Player on each team is shown in the bottom chart, where you can clearly see that Player 1 is the most valuable, and player 3 is the least valuable (or has the least opportunity to contribute).

Here is the Proposed New League Sheet:


With these changes you can see in the bottom chart that at the end of the doubles matches each player is equal on both teams with a value of 8. Therefore I believe that with this set up, all players will have the same opportunity to contribute, and the bias towards teams putting their best player as player 1 would be eliminated.

I spent a bunch of time on this (probably more than I should have), but feel free to voice your opinions and criticisms.

It is the objective of this thread to solve this issue.

Thanks,

Packer

^ Not a single mention that it was the math of a political science student that got the accountant onto the idea ^